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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

This is the graduation film of Eirik Gronmo Bjornsen and Anna Mantzaris. We made the film during our last year at the Animation Department at Volda University College in Norway.
The film is a Stop Motion short, a bit dark and mysterious but also with humor and heart.

Synopsis: A man with social anxiety gets followed by a naive and clumsy creature. Terrified the man tries to escape, unaware that the creature is actually a helper with slightly unconventional methods...

Technique: This film is made in Stop Motion. That means that we take a picture of the puppet, then we move it a tiny tiny bit, take a new picture, and continue. For every 25 pictures we have one second of animation.Since we like the handmade feel in Stop Motion, we tried to maintain that while we challenged ourselves on the technical level by using ball and socket armatures and face replacements on the puppet. The face replacements gives us a small library of expressions and gives a big variety of expressions on the puppet.

The film is at the moment being screened at festivals around the world.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Puppets with foam on them. From left: Neighbour Father, Neighbour Child, Janitor and Neighbour woman. On monday we will start with the heads!

Armatures for the secondary characters. We used shrink tubes around the wire ad k&s pipes for the joints. The puppets have replacable arms, legs and hands, mostly becuse we wanted to try it out and test for the main character.

A small test-creature to find out what material use for it. Since the creatures should feel a bit surrealistic, we wanted something that stands out from the rest of the movies universe. We were thinking of knitted or textile. But after trying feltmaking with wool, we loved it and decided to go for that techinque!

In order to decide the scale of the puppets and sets, we did some quick scale testing using cardboards. This was useful to find out if certain camera angles works. Becuase of the big and clumbsy creatures, we decides to make the overall scales not so big.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The film was screened at AnimationVolda 2012 Festivalduring September.
There it was selected as one of the 11 (among 49 student films) to screen and compete at Fredrikstad Animation Festival, oldest and largest animation festival in the Nordic region!
Fredrikstad Animation Festival will take place this weekend, 8-10th of November, and we are looking forward to it! :)